Just Start

I’ve been meaning to start a weblog for… well, years. I’ve had various accounts on LiveJournal, Myspace, etc. but never took them very seriously, because “any day now I’m going to register my own domain and host my own site somewhere,” but somehow I never got around to doing anything about it. Even a few months ago, when I finally decided to “get serious,” register a domain, and set up a hosting account, I never got as far as writing an actual post. After all, I can’t just start writing, can I? I need to find the perfect theme, and maybe there are some plugins I should install, and of course I need to read everything on the WordPress wiki so I know how to use every minute feature, and maybe I should think about using Feedburner for the RSS feed, so I’d better do some research… you get the idea.

I am an incredibly gifted procrastinator. Anytime I decide that I want to do something, I can come up with a million little reasons why I’m not doing it, why I can’t just jump in without an enormous amount of preparation, none of which I have the time or energy to do now. Sometimes I like to fool myself into thinking that this is perfectionism, but I really know that it’s just avoidance.

The worst part is that this runs totally contrary to the advice I’ve been giving to others for years. I’ve been known in my work life for a long time as an advocate of iterative design, incremental improvement and self-motivated initiative, and yet when it comes to the myriad projects I’ve adopted in the part of my life that doesn’t directly pay the bills, procrastination rules. Without any external motivators to embarrass me into action, my instinct to put it off takes over.

With this post I’m putting a stake in the ground. The custom theme and fancy plugins can come later — this post is going out as-is and my weblog will finally launch, unceremoniously, into the world. And all I really needed to do was just start writing.

I find that it helps to create the drafts in WordPress for any ideas that you have. Even if you don’t write any content at first, just having a place carved out to go add some thoughts when you have a minute can feel like you’ve removed a big mental barrier.

i totally did the research too much stuff thing, too. anyway, glad you’re blogging now. how come you’re not on the wac blogroll? (oo, a code word in case you wanted to keep your association secret or something :p)